Mixing fact and fiction

Our review of the new Reagan bio: the author's trick of putting
himself in the story often captures the subject but loses the
reader

By John F. Stacks

September 27, 1999
Web posted at: 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT)

It was the summer of 1989, as I recollect, the kind of swampy,
sweaty Washington day that makes cheap, polyester, short-sleeve
shirts stick to the bulging middles of the bureaucrats. Edmund
Morris and I ducked into the coolness of the F Street Club.
Edmund had driven over from his Capitol Hill town house in his
new Jaguar sedan. But even the soothing luxury of the club didn't
seem to console Edmund.

"I just don't get him," he complained. He was working on the
first authorized biography of a sitting President, Ronald Wilson
Reagan. Part of Morris' mountainous $3 million advance was
already earning interest in the money market. "He seems so
vacant, so empty," Morris complained. "Yet he did great things;
he was a great President. Maybe as great as Teddy Roosevelt."
Edmund had won a Pulitzer for his 1979 biography of the heroic
T.R.

I hadn't spent as much time with Reagan as Edmund had, but I had
covered him as candidate and as President. I first interviewed
Reagan in 1967, when he was Governor of California. I told Edmund
that story, hoping it would be instructive:

I was ushered into the Governor's office in Sacramento, and
there sat Reagan, suit coat buttoned, appearing to pore over
some documents. I clicked on the tape recorder, or thought I
did. Assured of a magnetic record, I neglected to take notes. We
talked for nearly an hour. Back at the hotel, I discovered that
the tape had not worked. When the panic subsided, I replayed the
conversation in my head, for in those fine days, my memory was
still crisp. Reagan had said nothing of interest. Blank tape,
empty notebook, shallow man.

The first part of this reminiscence is fictional, although some
of the specifics are true. I have never met Edmund Morris. The
account of the interview in Sacramento is true, or is at least my
best recollection.

And that's what it's like reading Morris' new biography, Dutch:
A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Random House; 874 pages; $35). There
is fact and there is fiction, and they are jumbled together. The
facts are meticulously footnoted in an epic 115-page section at
the end of the book. But so is the fiction. Morris has created
detailed and utterly false notes to buttress the fanciful parts
of his book, which feature a fictional character, also named
Edmund Morris, who is a contemporary of Dutch Reagan's. That he
called the book a "memoir" and not a biography is of course a
tip-off to the game.

This dramatic departure from standard biographical orthodoxy has
already, even before the book goes on sale this week, set off
alarms, with traditionalists condemning Morris and Morris himself
scheduling a blitz of appearances on the TV yack shows to explain
and defend his heterodoxy. The Old Guard from the Reagan White
House, who had arranged Morris' appointment as official
chronicler, are all holding their breath, concerned only that
their beloved President be lovingly portrayed, by whatever
device. Said Ken Duberstein, Reagan's last White House chief of
staff: "I'm not looking forward to it, and I don't know anyone
who is." Perhaps not accidentally, the very boldness of Morris'
device is bringing a flood of attention to the book, 14 anguished
years in the making, and will surely spark an initial rush to buy
it. Finally, it will rekindle the debate over whether Reagan
moved the history of his time or was merely present at its
creation.

Morris' bizarre conceit of inserting his fictional alter ego into
some parts of Reagan's life story begins in the very first
chapter, in which Morris recounts his (apparently real) agony
over whether to accept the role as the official presidential
biographer. He alludes, confusingly, to having seen Reagan as a
youth, and then tells the apparently true story of spending an
evening with the Reagans at the White House.

"There's one good reason to do it, aside from the money," he
tells his wife on the way home. "I've known Dutch much longer
than anybody realizes. He least of all!" Reagan was then in his
70s and the real Morris in his 40s, and the literary
hallucination begins.

"Damned if I can figure him out, though," Morris continues to his
wife. "Is he a political genius, or a bore?" This, of course, is
the central Reagan conundrum that many biographers have tried to
answer. As he seeks to answer it, Morris traces the life of the
future, nearly godlike President through the eyes of the
fictional Morris. There is an encounter on the football field:
"The square-cut youth and I briefly exchanged glances... A
million miles away a factory siren wailed. His purposeful body
moved on, exuding liniment. I dropped the candy wrapper I had
been holding--and as I reached for it, his wet sleeve brushed my
hand."

Then comes a visit to the swimming beach in Dixon, Ill., where
Reagan was a lifeguard and where, he would eventually claim, he
made 77 rescues over the years: "He was deeply tan, and at least
four inches taller than when I had last seen him. His chest was
bigger, his legs stronger and straighter... Presently he
shrugged off the top of his damp suit. The loops fell away,
leaving behind pale ghosts of themselves. Midges sang."

Later, in Hollywood, the fictional Morris becomes a hack
screenwriter and spies Reagan and his soon-to-be first wife Jane
Wyman on the beach: "This mature Dutch--'Ronnie' she calls him--is
tall and sparely straight, constructed in flats, a mobile
Mondrian ... Even his pectorals are flat and square; he has no
bulges in him, of brawn or brain."

The temptation, once the ruse is discovered, is to ignore the
long sections about the faux Morris. But buried within these
sections are some trenchant and worthwhile observations about
Reagan. After a dreamy sequence imagining Reagan practicing his
swimming, Morris observes: "The swimmer enjoys a loneliness
greater, yet oddly more comforting, than that of the long
distance runner. One tunnels along in a shroud of silvery bubbles
... Others may swim alongside for a while, but their
individuality tends to refract away, through the bubbles and the
blur. Often I have marveled at Reagan's cool, unhurried progress
through crises of politics and personnel, and thought to myself,
He sees the world as a swimmer sees it." It is an elegant way to
describe the serene detachment that marked the public, and
private, Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan who emerges in Dutch is often of heroic dimension. But
Morris is also acute and critical about the sometimes goofy,
floating chimera who was President for eight years. Morris cites
a former aide as saying that the President's attention span
"would compare to that of a fruit fly." He tells the story of
seeing President Reagan the morning after they had actually dined
together at the Morris home: "Not only did he fail to mention our
dinner, it was obvious from his smiling yet distant demeanor that
he did not recall it."

Morris' image of Reagan today, in decline under Alzheimer's, is
poignant and surreal. "He will rake leaves from the pool for
hours, not understanding that they are being surreptitiously
replenished by his Secret Service men." When Reagan acknowledged
his ailment in 1994, many who had been struck by his odd
driftiness during the White House years began to wonder whether
it had been the disease beginning its assault on his brain.
Morris is adamant in opposing that view. "To those readers who
will seize on this as evidence of incipient dementia in the White
House, I reply: You do not understand that actors remember
forward, not backward. Yesterday's take is in the can; today is
already rolling: tomorrow's lines must be got by heart."

Maybe, but Reagan was, by the accounts of those who worked most
closely with him, one of the most passive and incurious men to
ever occupy the Oval Office. During his first term, one of his
closest advisers swore that on his own, Reagan could not have
found the office of the White House chief of staff. Morris'
reconstruction of the Iran-contra scandal paints a devastating
picture of a floundering and uncomprehending Chief Executive.

What set Morris off on his risky, semi-fictional path? The
author was seriously late in delivering his book and anguished
about writer's block and his inability to get to the core of
Reagan. Perhaps it was the arrogance of the intellectual who
cannot make himself believe that a person with an ordinary mind
can be a powerful leader. Perhaps it was the need do something
different with Reagan's life, to justify the big advance and the
long delay in producing the book.

The historical sleight of hand has one virtue, aside from
creating commercially valuable buzz. Trying to thread one's way
through what is made up and what is real in this book is not
unlike being around the actual Reagan, who invented statistics,
replayed movie plots as if they were history and answered
questions with such bewildering non sequiturs that interrogators
were stunned into silence. This biography could have been called
Zelig Meets Chauncey Gardner.

Morris is also a brilliant writer--of both fact and fiction. His
stylishness is so dazzling that the reader may want to forgive
the manipulation he has employed. Again, this re-creates the
experience of being around Reagan, who was so deeply likeable as
a human being that even the most querulous reporter could be
charmed into protecting him from his own vacuousness.

In the end, however, the fact/fiction bipolarity erodes some of
the book's brilliance. The reader begins to doubt Morris even
when he describes events without resorting to dramatic trickery.
His account of Reagan's summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in
Iceland is so vivid as to make it seem Morris sat with the two
leaders. In fact, Morris admits he was not there; he went to
Iceland later and, relying on interviews, "enjoyed the scribe's
traditional advantage of being able to recollect emotions in
tranquility." Morris' brilliant portrait of Teddy Roosevelt's
rise to the presidency was of course built from research
embellished by his imagination.

In T.R., Morris had a President who moved events. He seems to
want to believe that to be true of Reagan as well. Morris says
as much in the final, cloying scene of the book. He tells the
reader that he himself was one of the people lifeguard Dutch
saved from the river, and concludes: "Some day, I hoped, America
might acknowledge her similar debt to the old Lifeguard who
rescued her in a time of poisonous despair..."

The writer's job, Morris observes, is different from the actor's
in that the author tries to remember backward, to turn
experience into a literary account. "To the actor, only artifice
is actual," Morris writes. Unfortunately in this book, Morris
has switched roles.